


indispensable to the lover

by draculard



Series: Comfortween [21]
Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Possibly Unrequited Love, Repressed Emotions, Supernatural Comfort, Takes place during Treason, The Second Sight, The Third Sight, mind-reading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27256210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Vah'nya can control the Second Sight — usually.But when it connects her to Grand Admiral Thrawn's mind against her will, right in the middle of his reunion with Eli Vanto, Vah'nya finds that she can't break away.
Relationships: Thrawn & Vah'nya, Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo/Eli Vanto
Series: Comfortween [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946224
Comments: 15
Kudos: 96
Collections: Comfortween 2020





	indispensable to the lover

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Friedrich Nietzsche: "indispensable ... to the lover is his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference."

Sometimes, Vah’nya could turn the Second Sight on and off like the power button on a questis. Other times, it called her to somebody specific against her will and gave her insights she didn’t want. The most irritating part was that when she actually _wanted_ a connection with somebody else’s mind, she had to really work at it — and sometimes couldn’t quite achieve it — but when she had no interest and no definitive _reason_ to use it, the Sight took it upon itself to form the connection for her. 

As soon as she saw Thrawn for the first time, she felt a headache coming on and knew it was going to be one of those days. 

She tried to avoid his eyes — sometimes that helped — but whereas most officers would see this and dismiss her as shy, it seemed to have the opposite effect on Thrawn. He watched her curiously, studying her even as he spoke with others, and the fact that he wouldn’t look away just made things ten times worse. With _him_ thinking about _her_ and _her_ studiously trying not to think about _him_ , the connection was unavoidable.

She squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled sharply as her mind collided with Thrawn’s.

_Damn it._

He was a _fast_ thinker, too — those were always the worst. His thoughts scrolled by so quickly that they were incoherent, and Vah’nya was pretty sure that he wasn’t even thinking in a cogent noun-verb structure; everything was a rapid, logical cascade of disconnected words that made absolutely no sense to Vah’nya.

With a great deal of effort, she pulled back from his mind and did her best to just ignore it. Most minds she connected to were … well, slower. Loose. Relaxed. Thrawn’s was loose as well, she supposed, but in a manic, dizzying way that made her headache ten times more painful; he didn’t seem to have any preferred method of thinking, like most Chiss she knew; he attacked each problem he came across from ten different ways, building structures of logic in his mind and then tearing them apart again just to rebuild them in different formations, with a flexibility that hurt her brain — and then, once he’d discovered each possible solution, he analyzed them with a hard rigidity until he’d ranked them in order of best to worst.

Vah’nya put a hand to her temples and tried not to groan. Through Thrawn’s eyes, too, she could see his heightened sensitivity to light — not bad enough to require corrective treatment or surgery, but slightly worse than most military officers — and sound as well, and smell (he thought somebody named Ronan smelled absolutely _terrible_ , and he couldn’t stop thinking about it), and the physical sensations of the deck vibrating beneath his feet and the slight change in air pressure every time a hatchway opened. 

Vah’nya closed her eyes, trying to block the sensations out. And they said _navigators_ could get sensory overload — this was utter insanity! She’d just stick close to Admiral Ar’alani and hope she didn’t miss anything too important while she was distracted. How Thrawn was able to function with a brain this messed up, she didn’t know — he wasn’t wired right in the _slightest_ , but it seemed like he’d spent years making crude but effective lattices and scaffolds in his mind to make his thought process not just functional, but unique enough to pull one over on other people every now and again. 

Vah’nya would very much rather _not_ be privy to it.

She kept her eyes averted from Thrawn, quietly counting the seconds as they ticked by in an effort to distract herself from his mind. Gradually, his wild thought process became nothing more than a dull roar of white noise and a background headache — not _easy_ to ignore, exactly, but still theoretically ignore-able.

And then, of course, Eli had to walk back into the room. 

Vah’nya knew, intellectually, that Eli and Thrawn had known each other before Eli joined the Ascendancy. She’d heard Thrawn was the one who sent him, and though Eli had never mentioned Thrawn to her specifically, the other officers said that when he first got to the Ascendancy, he wouldn’t stop asking questions about Thrawn and the House of Mitth. Questions that went unanswered, mostly — both because nobody wanted to wade into that political mess and because few people on the _Steadfast_ knew anything personal about Thrawn. 

“Lieutenant Vanto,” Thrawn said, his voice clipped and professional as he waved Eli over.

Vah’nya almost keeled over. She reached out blindly for Admiral Ar’alani and grabbed onto her arm for support, and was grateful when Ar’alani held still but didn’t ask questions. With her eyes closed, Vah’nya gritted her teeth and tried to shake the feeling away.

It didn’t dissipate. As Eli walked up to Thrawn, the surge of emotion stayed strong, never ebbing, never fading. When Thrawn handed Eli his datapad to look over, their fingers brushed and the feeling only got worse.

Vah’nya felt tears stinging at the corners of her eyes. She took a quick, shallow breath, and felt Admiral Ar’alani’s hand on her back.

“Are you unwell?” Ar’alani murmured in Cheunh.

Hissing in pain, Vah’nya shook her head. She blinked through the tears, backing away from Thrawn’s mind as much as she could. When she finally had the emotional lightning storm under control, she shook her head and said, “No, Admiral. I’m fine.”

She could sense Ar’alani’s doubt, but no more questions were asked. Just a few meters away, Thrawn watched as Eli looked over the information on the datapad. His face was unreadable but calm, as if he were thinking absently of other things — making battle plans, perhaps — but Vah’nya had unique insight into exactly how much of a farce this was. He wasn’t making battle plans at all; his thoughts were centered with a ferocious intensity on one thing.

Eli Vanto.

Vah’nya watched as Thrawn studied Eli’s face surreptitiously, doing it so subtly that she only knew he was doing it because she had access to his mind. He took in the changes a year had wrought on Eli — the difference in his hair, which had changed greatly in cut and slightly in curl and shade as well; the changes in skin tone and texture (He looked older now, Thrawn thought, but Vah’nya suspected it was simply that his mental image of Eli was stuck on their first meeting, years before); the new, hard lines of muscle mass beneath his uniform, from where the Chiss training regimen had whipped him into even better shape than the Empire had.

The mixed weariness and confidence in his eyes.

Thrawn’s heart ached; Vah’nya could feel it as if it were her own. He wanted to speak to Eli; he wanted to pull him aside and speak in private, admit everything. But with the same cold, logical process by which he handled everything, Thrawn ruled this out as an option.

It would distract Eli from his real goal, he told himself.

And any such confession would be unwanted in any case.

And it would make things even more painful between them than they already were.

He didn’t know where he’d gone wrong, Vah’nya realized, but he _did_ know he’d gone wrong somewhere. He’d noticed Eli’s coldness to him, couldn’t quite understand what he’d said or done to earn it, decided multiple reasons were possible.

 **First of all:** that their working relationship had never been quite so close to friendship as he hoped; that he had simply fooled himself a little, allowed himself to believe Eli was warmer to him than he really was. If this were true, then Eli had _always_ been cold to him, and he was only imagining that today’s coldness was new.

He examined this option with genuine anxiety, turning it over and giving it proper consideration before tentatively discarding it — all the while hyper-aware that if he _were_ fooling himself, he would never be able to tell without assistance and an outside point of view.

 **Second of all:** that he’d said something to offend Eli, either in his journal or in greeting him earlier today (Thrawn thought over his words, ‘Good day, Lieutenant Vanto,’ and deemed them entirely inoffensive; they’d been surrounded by warriors both Chiss and human, and Eli had reacted poorly in the past when Thrawn treated him as a friend in front of other people). But he had offended Eli many times by mistake; as such, he didn’t dismiss this option out of hand.

 **Third** **:** that Eli resented him, that his position with the Chiss was unsatisfactory, that he wished to return to the Empire but no longer could — _felt_ he no longer could, perhaps, for reasons of pride or possibly of moral confusion. Thrawn reorganized his thoughts, placing this motivator at the top of the list. 

**Fourth** **:** that Eli had asked questions about him in the Ascendancy, discovered news of Thrawn’s past — both military and otherwise — and decided he disapproved. This was the one Thrawn’s mind got stuck on even though he didn’t deem it as likely as Option 3; he turned it over and looked at it from different angles with a ferocity that almost scared Vah’nya, cross-referencing it with what he knew of Eli’s upbringing and culture, looking for things Thrawn might have done before exile that would go against the grain of Eli’s personality — or things that might have been twisted in public record to reflect motivations and atrocities Thrawn had never genuinely held or committed. 

But underneath all this logical reasoning was the bare truth: that Thrawn couldn’t even look at Eli without an almost-crippling flare of quiet heartache and distress. 

Vah’nya gave herself time to adjust to the pain, the same way Thrawn must have gradually adjusted to it; she examined his cool, impassive face and, when she felt ready, delved deeper into his mind. 

It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for. It was one of the few thoughts in Thrawn’s head that formed an actual, coherent sentence, with correct word order and all. She knew as soon as she found it that it was structured that way because he’d thought it multiple times, over and over again, as if he chanted it to himself like a mantra. 

_Eli can never know._

Vah’nya swallowed hard, blinking past tears again. She could see all of Thrawn’s reasons — too many to surmount, and many of them too sound to argue with. And she could see the uncertainty beneath it all — the spark of hope that Thrawn couldn’t help but feed into, but seemed determined to drown out. 

“It looks right to me, sir,” said Eli, his tone distant and professional as he handed the datapad back. Thrawn took it at once, already responding in a measured voice that gave nothing of his internal struggle away. 

Vah’nya felt an overwhelming gush of sympathy for him. She knew almost nothing about him or his past, but she knew he was exiled — that he could never return home, that he was stuck here among aliens who could never understand him. She got the sense that even back home, among his own people, he’d never really been understood, and the odd structure of his brain stood in testament to that. 

But Eli at least came _close_ to understanding him. And now Eli, too, was out of reach. For his own safety; for the sake of the Chiss people, who Thrawn was bound and determined to protect even if it destroyed him — his mind, his legacy, his soul. There was nothing he wouldn’t sacrifice to keep the Ascendancy safe. After their business here was done — whether Thrawn admitted how he felt or not — Eli would go back to the CEDF, and it was entirely possible they’d never see each other again.

As Thrawn talked with Eli, he let none of his emotions show. He’d been hiding them for so long that to do so now appeared effortless. 

It wasn’t right, Vah’nya thought, that anyone should be so alienated or alone. She couldn’t in good faith talk to him — admit that she’d spied on his mind, even accidentally? Advise him to talk to Eli when she didn’t even know how Eli would react, and certainly couldn’t guarantee he felt the same way? Both options seemed certain to cause more harm than good.

But she could do one thing. She’d done it before, when the other skywalkers aboard the _Steadfast_ were upset. 

Closing her eyes, Vah’nya reached out toward Thrawn and sent a wave of emotion his way: a sense of comfort and security designed to soothe the negative thoughts and emotions away. She could feel the swirl of logical processes in his mind start to slow; the flurry of calculations and ciphers in the background seemed to calm down. The heartache dissolved a little, replaced with an aching surge of relief that made him cut himself off mid-sentence, blinking rapidly against a sudden sting of tears brought on not by the sadness he’d been dealing with for years but by the brief, comforting touch of someone who cared.

He turned, meeting her eyes sharply, and Vah’nya’s breath caught in her throat.

 _Don’t,_ Thrawn thought, and instantaneously — as if he’d pulled a barricade down between them — the connection she’d felt to his mind was gone.

Like Eli, she’d been shut out. 


End file.
